“The cinema has no boundary,” American writer and director Orson Welles once observed. “It is a ribbon of dream.”
Films have the power to transport and inspire. Theaters, then, are vehicles. They are temples. From the era of silent film through the late 1950s, Alabama’s Robert Wilby oversaw some iconic early movie houses in the state and region.
Robert Bailey Wilby was born in Selma in 1888. He was the firstborn child of English immigrant William Wilby and Alabamian Elizabeth Wood. After high school, Robert attended the Georgia School of Technology. He returned to Selma in 1908 with a newly minted engineering degree and entered into business with his father. A contractor and plumber by trade, William Wilby had signed on to manage and maintain Selma’s Academy of Music. At the time, the academy was more of a traditional playhouse for traveling theatre troupes. Young Robert encouraged his father to expand the academy’s offerings to include silent films. For the next three years, father and son worked alongside each other at the academy. Beginning in 1911, Robert Wilby ran the establishment himself.
In 1915, Wilby’s talents caught the eye of the proprietors of the Strand Amusement Co., who lured him to Montgomery to manage their three movie houses: The Strand, Orpheum and Plaza. The company added another theater, the Colonial, the following year. Tickets for the theaters ranged from 5 cents to 40 cents. Wilby made the Strand — located at historic Court Square — his base of operations.
The eager new manager worked to make the company’s theaters the most comfortable and popular in town. When patrons complained the Strand was too hot, a potential death sentence for a business in the summertime Southland, Wilby acted quickly to remedy the problem with additional electric fans and an expensive new ventilation system that cost a reported $1,500 (about $42,000 today). It proved a worthwhile expense. Later, he initiated the first Saturday morning movies in the city for young children.
To keep patrons apprised of the many goings-on at the various Strand theaters, Wilby began a weekly newsletter. Though principally comprised of clips from industry publications, Wilby managed to insert his own writings and wit. In the first issue, he announced a $10 naming contest for the publication. Thus, the first few editions were cheekily entitled “THIS PAPER HAS NO NAME.” Nearly 200 people wrote in with suggestions. Wilby selected “STRAMCO POST,” an acronym for “Strand Amusement Company’s Plaza, Orpheum and Strand Theaters.”
Enterprising Wilby also had his own interests. In an era of segregation, state and municipal laws prohibited African Americans from enjoying the amusements of the Strand Co.’s theaters. In 1917, Wilby partnered with three area businessmen and founded the Pekin Amusement Co., to construct a new theater for Black patrons. Capital stock in the new venture began at $10,000.
History happens to us all. As Robert Wilby worked to establish himself in Montgomery, the drums of war in Europe grew louder. Once America entered the Great War, the theater manager did his part to aid the home front. He booked government-produced films on American preparedness and a documentary filmed on the battlefields of France. He opened his theaters for rallies, fundraisers and other patriotic functions. When the government selected Montgomery as a place to train soldiers, Wilby made them feel “wanted and welcome” in the city, offering up the orchestras of the Strand and Orpheum theaters for social functions. He even set up one of his older “moving-picture machines” on the nearby base, Camp Sheridan. The theaters of Strand Amusement Co. encouraged patrons to join in singing the “The Star-Spangled Banner” between films. During the holiday season of 1918, Wilby offered soldiers free movie tickets.
In 1918, the Strand Amusement Co. extended its reach to Birmingham. Executives put Robert Wilby at the head of those theaters as well. His hometown paper took note of the promotion and praised Wilby’s “unusual and extraordinary ability” in the business of motion pictures. A year later, he signed on with S. A. Lynch Enterprises, overseeing more than a dozen of their Alabama theaters.
Wilby’s star continued to rise. By 1931, he was vice president of a chain of more than 30 southern theaters. That same year, he acquired the Paramount-Publix theaters in several Alabama cities, like Anniston, Selma and Montgomery, including some of the same establishments he managed as a younger man. His partner in the venture was Herbert F. Kincey, another Dallas County native, who once worked with Wilby at the Academy of Music. By 1949, they managed nearly 100 theaters together.
In 1938, the year he turned 50, Wilby’s hometown extended him a great honor: the renovated Academy of Music — the place where his career began — was renamed in his honor. “SELMA’S DREAMS HAVE COME TRUE” read an advertisement in the local paper. The Wilby Theatre continued in operation for more than three decades thereafter. It was destroyed by fire in June 1972. Today, the Selma Public Library occupies the site.
Failing health brought an abrupt close to Wilby’s half-century managerial career in 1957. Herbert Kincey replaced him as head of their company. Though residing in Atlanta, he maintained close ties in Selma and Montgomery. When Wilby died in September 1961 at the age of 73, businessmen from both cities attended his funeral. Alabama newspapers marked the passing of the homegrown “Movie Man.”
By the time of Wilby’s death, none of the original Montgomery theaters he managed remained in operation. The beloved Strand had closed in late July 1952. In the era of “talkies,” that followed Wilby’s departure from the city, the Strand nurtured a generation of young B-Western movie aficionados. But the demise of these Capital City temples of silent film in favor of increasingly larger theaters would likely come as no surprise to Robert Wilby, who enjoyed a long career along a rapidly changing “ribbon of dream.”
Historian Scotty E. Kirkland is a freelance contributor to Business Alabama. He lives in Wetumpka.
This article appears in the July 2024 issue of Business Alabama.
